Culture

Osama bin Laden's Library Included a 9/11 Conspiracy Book. Naturally.

But no Thomas Friedman

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The U.S. government has just released a list of English-language pdf files found in Osama bin Laden's compound after he was killed. From Rosie Gray's report in BuzzFeed:

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"Of the 38 full length English language books he had in his possession, about half of them were conspiracy theory books" about the Illuminati, Freemasons, and other conspiracy topics[, said an intelligence official.] Texts listed on the "bookshelf" include Bloodlines of the Illuminati by the American conspiracy theorist Fritz Springmeier; The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11, by the 9/11 conspiracy theorist David Ray Griffin; materials from Congressional hearings about Project MKUltra, the so-called "mind control" program conducted by the CIA in the 1950s and 1960s; and The Secrets of the Federal Reserve, a book by the Holocaust denier and anti-Semite Eustace Mullins.

Wait. Back up. Osama bin Laden was reading 9/11 truth literature? Too bad these weren't physical books; I would have loved to have read his notes in the margins.

Bin Laden also had a copy of The 9/11 Commission Report (it would have been interesting to read his annotations on that one too) and an article titled "Website Claims Steve Jackson Game Foretold 9/11." Other writers in his digital bookshelf, some conspiracy-focused and some not, include Bob Woodward, Noam Chomsky, Antony Sutton, CIA Director Michael Hayden, and the authors of the HP Printer Owner's Manual. Plus "scans of several pages from" the 2008 Guinness Book of World Records Children's Edition, which the government includes on a list of "documents probably used by other compound residents." (Don't be so sure, fellas.)

The government's full list of bin Laden's reading materials is here. Springmeier was a devotee of John Todd, whose vast conspiracy narrative stretched from Ayn Rand to Elton John; you can read more about him here. An obligatory Onion video is here: